reading this was like watching a satire horror movie followed with beautifully worded narration of the main character's inner voice along with snarky dialogue. rotting floorboards of an ancient cultural mansion, paintings of folkloric beings that come to life, a calm pond with gnarly secrets. the book is utterly generous with as many grotesque imagery as you can imagine. i found a pacing to be a bit slow for the first three chapters. (i found that this is my issue with a lot of media, perhaps me and my attention deficit are the problem.) but the book definitely picked up the pace as soon as lin entered the picture. i don't really like any of the characters, but lin for sure gave life and contributed to a huge fracture of the humor in the story. at first, i found the writing to have a flowery serioust tone; but as it progresses, it adopted a meta-comedic atmosphere that satirizes the horror movie scene. i loved it, i love the exchanges between cat and lin, the banter between faiz and phillip and discovering the deep-embedded wounds that unpiled between the two. i'd hate to spoil, so i cannot say much about it. overall, i really love the writing; how it blends a glimmering tapestry of words while being funny at the same time. i'd love to read more stories like these, i had lots of fun. .ᘛ♰ᘚ. i dropped in a little moodboard with images from a nbbt-inspired board i found by @pennylane19 on pinterest